There are more than 600 million television households outside of Europe and North America. A large potential market exists with this vast population for television services, such as pay television services including pay-per-view. Pay television is undergoing exponential growth in, among other places, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Currently, less than 5% of the international television households can be reached by pay television services. The fact that so few successful pay television systems exist internationally indicates that there are significant problems in reaching this market. The problems involved in delivering pay television services internationally include programming and rights availability, government regulation, local marketing of services, collection of fees, etc. Among these problems is the lack of an available, secure and cost-effective signal delivery method.
In the pay television industry, programmers produce programs for distribution to various remote locations. A program may include video, audio, and other related services, such as closed-captioning and teletext services. Typically, a programmer will supply these services via a satellite to individual subscribers and/or cable television operators. In the case of cable television operators, the services transmitted via a satellite are received at the operator's cable headend installations. A cable operator typically receives programs and other services from many programmers and then selects the programs/services it wishes to distribute to its subscribers. In addition, a cable operator may insert locally produced services at the cable headend. The selected services and locally produced services are then transmitted to the individual subscribers via a coaxial cable distribution network. In the case of DBS (direct broadcast satellite) subscribers, each subscriber receives a satellite downlink from the programmers directly. In the past, pay television systems, including cable and DBS systems have operated in the analog domain. Recently, however, the pay television industry has begun to move toward hybrid and all digital systems wherein, prior to transmission, all analog signals are converted to digital signals. Digital signal transmission offers the advantage that digital data can be processed at the transmission end and the receiving end to improve picture quality. Further, digital data compression techniques have been developed that achieve high signal compression ratios. Digital compression allows a larger number of individual services to be transmitted within a fixed bandwidth. Bandwidth limitations are imposed by both satellite transponders and coaxial cable distribution networks, and therefore digital compression is extremely advantageous.
Existing methods to deliver pay television services internationally have inherent weaknesses. The ideal way to deliver pay television is via cable television (CATV). However, CATV cannot reach enough television households in the immediate future because of the time, cost, and risk involved in building a CATV plant. The financial risk associated with building a CATV plant is directly related to the regulatory environment in a given region/country and the availability of "franchises." Franchises guarantee the possibility of a return in an area where the CATV operator has at least a near-monopoly. Few international areas have regulatory and political environments with sufficient stability to assure the return on investment which CATV plant construction requires.
Another alternative for delivering pay television services is direct-to-home (DTH) television (i.e., direct tv). For either analog or digital DTH delivery, the high entry cost for the subscriber ($500 to more than $1000) and the troublesome logistics of installing satellite dishes at individual subscribers' homes severely limits the market. It is no accident that only a handful of DTH businesses exists worldwide, and that few, if any, have been profitable. DTH is also inherently inefficient in a multiple dwelling unit (MDU) environment where each unit requires its own dish. It would be far more practical to use a single digital decoder which can serve many units in the MDU simultaneously, significantly reducing the cost of delivery.
A subscriber satellite television system (STV) has proven to be viable as a regional pay television vehicle using broadcast ultra high frequency (UHF) spectrum, but only in the absence of other effective pay television competition. For example, in France, Canal+has in effect a regulated monopoly on pay television services, and has reached four million subscribers out of twenty million. However, STV has a severely limited bandwidth, and is subject to availability of the broadcast VHF/UHF frequencies. STV cannot survive DTH or CATV competition in the long term and is therefore impractical.
Another option for delivering pay television services is multi-channel, multi-point distribution service (MMDS). MMDS has the distinguishing feature of being much more rapidly deployable than CATV and less bandwidth limited than STV. Multi-point distribution services are analogous to over-the-air CATV networks. Satellite broadcasts received at a central facility are retransmitted within the 2150 to 2162 and 2500 to 2680 MHZ frequency bands to small roof-top antennas in the vicinity. Each subscriber antenna must have a clear line-of-sight view of the transmitting antenna because trees, buildings and other obstructions strongly absorb the microwaves. MMDS can be used for relaying movies and other pay-per-view programs to hotels and apartment complexes. In hotels, guests can simply call the main desk to view a movie or special event. Apartment or condo dwellers typically pay a set fee per month to view MMDS television.
MMDS is a feasible concept and a method of signal delivery that is widely deployed internationally. However, in markets which predominantly include television households in MDUs and where satellite programs are available, MMDS is essentially a redundant and unnecessary terrestrial redistribution step. In these MMDS systems, there is no need to have multiple antennas to serve many customers located in close proximity such as in the same MDU. Furthermore, MMDS has significant limitations in terms of line-of-sight reach, picture quality due to reflections and ghosting, and the need for transmitter site real-estate.
The most cost-effective signal delivery system for international pay television services is satellite master antenna television (SMATV). Several considerations lead to this conclusion. International population density is high and the majority of international television households are in MDUs. Moreover, the disposable income of the international population is low and a significant percentage of people cannot afford single family dwellings, even if sufficient space exists to build such dwellings.
Presently, most MDUs are already served by master antenna television (MATV) and SMATV systems. Master antenna television systems use one or more high quality centrally located antennas which relay television signals to many televisions in a local apartment/condo or group housing complex. Thus, many MDUs are cabled, at minimum, for redistribution of off-air programming (MATV) and increasingly for in-the-clear satellite programming (SMATV). SMATV systems cost less to build per subscriber than the other television service delivery methods. Typically, international SMATV systems can be built for less than $100 per home passed (depending on the number of homes served) compared with, for example, CATV which costs between $500 and $1000 per home passed excluding subscriber equipment.
However, SMATV is not ideally suited for delivering pay television services with current delivery systems. For example, SMATV systems are good for delivering signals in the clear, but they are not normally used to deliver premium "pay-tv" services. In particular, existing SMATV systems are too small to afford secure addressable scrambling systems. Furthermore, pay-tv operators lose control in the SMATV environment. Existing SMATV systems force pay-tv operators to deal with SMATV operators as bulk redistributors of programming in-the-clear which significantly reduces the pay-tv operators' ability to control their programming.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a cost-effective signal delivery system for television services on an international scale. More specifically, there is a need to provide a method of bypassing the SMATV headend and to inexpensively provide security and addressability thereby giving control of programming to the pay-tv operator.